Why Don't Joe Manchin & Kyrsten Sinema Understand Power?

Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) and Joe Manchin (D-WV)

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) has been in elected off for almost all of the past 15 years.  She served in the Arizona State House, then the State Senate, then the US House of Representatives, and finally the US Senate where she began her tenure in 2019.  Sinema's career, though, is unusual in that up until a few months ago, she'd never served in the majority party.  Arizona has long had Republican majorities in their state legislatures, and Sinema joined the House in 2012 but left it in 2018, the year Nancy Pelosi won back the majority.  Sinema, therefore, has only been able to have success on a bipartisan basis-most of her career has been spent asking for permission from the majority party if she needs something to pass, and she has never actually been able to pass piece of legislation along a party-line vote until this year.

This is something I keep thinking of when it comes to Sinema's (and Sen. Joe Manchin's) insistence on keeping the filibuster.  I am not an impractical person when it comes to politics, and I don't expect that Sinema or Manchin are going to suddenly become "Defund the Police" acolytes or suddenly be sending their applications to join the Squad.  But it's very clear that Sinema & Manchin have lost some perspective on how power dynamics can change, and what their power is actually worth, because it's hard to look at the current Senate majority, and realize that they are squandering a golden opportunity.

It's very clear that traditional, large-scale bipartisanship is dead in the era of Trump & McConnell.  Donald Trump has made it so that democracy is a partisan issue (Sinema & Manchin are not dumb people, so they likely privately acknowledge this even if they aren't going to say it out-loud), and it's a partisan issue his party is not going to fight him on.  Mitch McConnell has learned that the best way to get back into power is through obstruction.  It worked in 2010, it worked in 2014, it worked in 2016, and honestly there's no real recent example of it not working, so McConnell is going to obstruct for the next two years in hopes that he can add 2022 to his long list of electoral prizes.

But this doesn't mean that small-scale bipartisanship has to be dead.  We saw that with the formation of the January 6th commission and the Trump impeachment-there is still an appetite for some rogue Republicans like Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, & Mitt Romney to join Democrats like Manchin & Sinema in cursory bipartisanship even if you're never going to get back to the era where a bill can pass with 70-80 votes in the Senate.  The thing that is stopping bipartisanship, is, in fact, the filibuster.

This is because Manchin & Sinema are unique in the sense that they are Senators #49 & 50 in the Senate.  Right now, it's Senator #60 who matters, and though it's not always McConnell (McConnell is not the 60th most progressive senator in the Senate by any yardstick), it is essentially him because he decides whether his caucus will have enough defections for Schumer to count to 60.  Without the filibuster, Schumer still has to count to 50, and that 50 is going to need to include some combination of Manchin/Sinema at least through 2022.  If Manchin or Sinema don't want to pass something, or they require that, say, at least one Republican back a bill in order to get it passed, they can do that.  And they can always do that even past 2022 as long as they can find enough moderates to play hardball-right now the filibuster favors the hard-right...getting rid of it would favor the middle.  There isn't much middle to speak of other than the senators I just listed (and people like Jon Tester & Dianne Feinstein), but the middle is there...you would almost certainly get more bipartisan bills without the filibuster than with it.

I don't know what it'll take to get this through to Manchin & Sinema, and part of me wonders if they just don't want to govern.  Manchin's motives in office have always been relatively clear-he's a social moderate but a fiscal liberal, mostly if he can get the money back to West Virginia.  If he were to realize the filibuster was worth destroying (it is), he could easily demand a mountain of cash go home to West Virginia with his name on it, a deal Biden/Schumer would gladly accept.  Sinema is different.  Unlike Manchin, her political beliefs are difficult to pinpoint.  Her politics initially were quite liberal (she worked for the Green Party in 2000), she rarely gives cable interviews (so it's hard to know where her priorities lie), and because she's shifted her viewpoints for two decades, you can't really pinpoint where negotiating would start with her.  Other than reproductive rights (which she is very supportive of, as she's adamantly pro-choice), there's not a lot of public faces to Sinema that would be easy to negotiate.  The Senate is currently 50/50 in terms of abortion rights (two Republicans that support, two Democrats who don't, though the latter includes Bob Casey who has a pretty good NARAL track record if it came down to it)...one wonders if Schumer could convince Sinema to back a national legalization of abortion with it clearly under threat from the Supreme Court, though that would be a tough vote for some red state Democrats (not just Manchin, but also Jon Tester & Raphael Warnock) to take if it came down to it.

But the main point here is simple-Manchin & Sinema are handicapping themselves.  They could have real power, and actually do something to moderate the political discourse, shifting some of the authority (likely permanently) back to the center of the political spectrum.  Their obstinance not only stands up for something that no longer exists (wide-scale bipartisanship), but it also gets in the way of their goal of trying to fix a broken Washington system that values gridlock over compromise.